MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewFor years now, the German historian Gotz Aly has been looking for causes. In densely documented book after book...he has sought \'to discern the utilitarian goals behind the murder of the European Jews.\' Aly is an earnest, tireless compiler of the often arcane or overlooked, yet there is something raw, never quite finished, if always usefully suggestive, in his approach ... Even with regard to Germany, Aly never manages to capture Nazism’s all-encompassing anti-Jewish hatred ... Rarely in Aly’s work does one find more than history’s unadorned bricks, which seem insufficient in explicating the underpinnings of the horror ... Still, Aly has a masterly command of the facts of the Nazi catastrophe, its bricks and mortar amassed in all their mountainous detail. And the details he captures are all the more crucial because they are generally inaccessible in secondary sources elsewhere ... Aly’s reminder of the usefulness of taking a close look at the quiet horrors of Europe’s interwar years thus, despite the shortcomings of his new book, feels all the more valuable today. And his acknowledgment that comparisons between now and then — once the province of the ill-informed — deserve more serious attention from historians and others is just one of many reminders as to how far we’ve stumbled into an age of troubled sleep.
